Monday, August 5, 2013

Shades of Fundamentalism in the GOP

The Republican Party, which dedicated
itself anew during the 2012 election to a savage, free-wheeling,
corporately-governed country, shows no sign of moderating its
fundamentalism.Indeed, its attacks on
the President and its internal debates on economic and security issues have
demonstrated just how many flavours of fundamentalism the party offers to those
to whom its mixture of economic radicalism, hatred, bigotry, and embrace of
violence, inequality, and exploitation appeal.

Just when you think there might be a
well-hidden vein of reason running through the party, you’re reminded that
lunacy is never far from the surface.For example, Rand
Paul recently accused Peter King—one
of the foremost proponents of U.S. terrorism abroad and security overreach at
home—of “being a part of a Republican wing that’s ‘all for blowing stuff up,
but not too concerned with fiscal responsibility’”.Paul represents a version of his father’s
libertarianism which favours U.S. isolationism, and some of his critiques of
U.S. foreign policy are on point.

However, he suffers from the same
immoral, America-centric view that afflicts many of his Congressional
colleagues.For instance, he hammered
the Obama administration’s policy of murdering people using drones...until he
was reassured that only foreigners could be killed in this extrajudicial
manner, at which point he dropped his objections.

Paul’s invocation of “fiscal
responsibility” is also telling, for this is a short-hand for neoliberalism.Paul is one of the foremost economic
fundamentalists in Congress, subscribing to the historically- and
morally-bankrupt fantasy of something called the “free market”, a supposedly
liberating state, sustained by faith rather than reason, in which all of
society’s interests magically align and create a Darwinist’s Utopia, in which
an invisible hand that bears a suspicious resemblance to the Koch Empire and
its ilk sorts out the virtuous for financial uplift from the undeserving who
are condemned to a hell on earth characterised by exploitation, opprobrium, and
penury.

Paul
summed up his lunacy in an election-night speech
wherein he claimed that “There are no rich, there are no poor, there are no
middle class [in America].We are all
interconnected in the economy”.Paul
Sr., famous for his indictment of U.S. war-making abroad, at least had the guts
to ask Americans how they would feel if their country was set upon, blitzed,
and occupied by imperialist invaders.And yet he was equally famous for telling a moderator at a GOP debate
that society should let an uninsured individual die, because people’s poverty,
and the structural inequality against which they vie, is their own fault.

If Rand Paul represents a chillingly
amoral approach to foreign policy, and a distressingly immoral view of
economics, Peter King represents the radical right on issues of national
security.King (who supported the IRA’s
bombing campaign in Britain) has advocated
the prosecution of whistleblowing journalists,
is a keen proponent of American terrorism abroad, and one of the foremost
defenders of our self-defeating domestic security escalation which shreds our
legal protections, dispenses with civil liberties, and is the surest way of
assuring a victory for “terrorism”—whether the acts of terror be those carried
out by “enemies” abroad, or those executed in our names by our government,
tarnishing our nation and ensuring the perpetuation of a never-ending series of
wars across the world.

King
declared it “absolutely
disgraceful that so many Republicans voted to defund the NSA program which has
done so much to protect our country”, ignoring the fact that the claims about
the importance of the NSA’s program to the plots it is alleged to have foiled
were deliberately manipulated to inflate the importance of its domestic
spying.He also ignored the fact that there
will be precious little of our values and identity left to defend if that
defence requires that we forego our civil rights and abdicate our democratic
rights to a set of irresponsible, fearmongering security organs with criminal
track records and terroristic tendencies.

Then of course there is Chris
Christie, who invoked the spectre of 9/11
to defend national security overreach, ignoring the role that U.S. colonialism
has historically played in inciting attacks on the U.S.Foreign policy fundamentalists, whether
moronic jingos or avowed neoconservative ideologues, are totally disinterested in
the operations of cause and effect, and show not an iota of motivation to
understand the actions of the people who comprise the global society of which
the U.S. is merely one, increasingly fragile part (to ask “why?” with reference
to 9/11 still invites attacks on one’s patriotism).

Ted Cruz, another blustering egomaniac,
is closer to Rand Paul in his zealotry, and seems poised to launch a
self-righteous purge of our politics, attempting to bully members of his own
party who break from his fundamentalism.It is a sad commentary on our society that almost to a member, one of
our major political parties believes the path to power runs through the domains
of fear, hatred, ignorance, exploitation, and mutual distrust.

But perhaps it is no wonder they feel
so.After all, Dick Cheney, George W
Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz walk
free after conspiring (or in the case of Powell staying silent in the face of
such conspiracy) to manufacture a war by using lies and false premises.That war has cost the U.S. trillions of
dollars, thousands of lives, killed at least 100,000 Iraqis, levelled whole
cities, and destroyed a country’s infrastructure in order that war profiteers
connected to the administration could rebuild under the guard of lawless, murdering
mercenaries which comprise a growing for-profit war industry.

The Nazis were charged with similar
crimes at Nuremberg, before the international legal structure had designed a
framework under which it could punish them for the violence of the
Holocaust.The International
Military Tribunal’s charter described the Nazis crimes as
“planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war
in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or
participation in a common plan or conspiracy [to do so]”.

The massive crimes of the Bush
Administration, and the failure of Congress to challenge them and of the Obama
administration to punish them (and his administration, with the collusion of
Congress and the incitement of the security services is guilty of its own
monstrous crimes), has created a culture of impunity.The same culture which allows mass murderers to
walk free after they allowed their foreign policy fundamentalism to run away
with them extends to the economic sector, where financial criminals—crimes
implemented under the regime of deregulation, labour casualisation, and free
market thuggery—are equally unaccountable.Such are these twin versions of fundamentalism that there appears to be
no sin too ugly and no crime too brutal that it cannot be excused by invoking
“national security” or the “free market”.

The Democrats are culpable in all of
this, and there are disturbing signs that they are in danger of signing up to
what has become a broad, right-wing consensus.But they are driven more by fear of the GOP, moral cowardice, and
electoral expediency than by the sadistic evangelism which seems to
characterise so much of the Republican Party’s fundamentalism.This unwavering commitment to a worldview which
extols social disunity, makes a virtue of exploitation, and encourages mutual
disrespect and societal irresponsibility is a very dangerous one.The physical and social violence that these
people are visiting on our country and on people in other parts of the world should
be stopped.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.